The Argentine military submarine ARA San Juan has been missing for approximately three days. Today there were reports of seven attempted transmissions from frequencies that appear to emanate from the sub. However, they were only a few seconds in duration and no direct communication was possible.

The Argentine’s are asking for help. The U.S. Navy has dispatched a P8-A Poseidon search aircraft and NASA has changed mission for a close proximity P-3 Orion aircraft that was already in the vicinity.

(CNN) The crew of a missing Argentine military submarine tried contacting naval bases seven times, Argentina’s Defense Ministry said. The calls were made on Saturday to different bases between 10:52 a.m. and 3:42 p.m. and ranged from four to 36 seconds long, the ministry said in a statement to CNN en Español. No communication connection was made.

The navy said the military is working with a US-based company that specializes in satellite communication to determine the location of the submarine, which has been missing for more than three days.

The ARA San Juan submarine and the 44 crew members were traveling through the Atlantic Ocean from a base in far southern Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego archipelago to its home port in Mar del Plata. The vessel had been due to arrive at its destination Sunday.

The submarine was last spotted Wednesday in the San Jorge Gulf, a few hundred kilometers off the coast of southern Argentina’s Patagonia region and nearly midway between the bases. (read more)

Still have not found that Malasia airline. It is a big ocean. As long as it did not suffer a catastrophic failure and the water is not to deep there is still a chance. USN will find it but it will be a race against the clock.

GPS is no good if the boat has no power. You can surface without electricity, but without it, no communications. If the batteries and powerplant are not in working order and they don’t have sat phones or some other backup means of sending a transmission, they could be a floating speck in a huge sea waiting to be found.

The best case is they are floating at least. Blowing ballast can get a boat topside. After that, without any power, they are basically a large life raft.

Keln, They’re down ! And it seems whatever causality occurred, its preventing them from surfacing . Considering the multiple levels of systems in a modern boat, that means serious damage or circumstances preventing surviving crew from raising ship !

I was trying to stay positive. But yeah. Last reports I saw, some sat transmissions got through, but probably from floaters launched that have GPS chips or something on them. Means they might be down. But if they are making attempts it means they are alive, possibly have electricity, and hopefully have scrubbers still operational. O2 canisters probably broken out at this point, so it is a time game.

They can use what transmission came out to pinpoint a location I think.

GPS was still a new thing when I was on an LA class, so I am not even sure what these german diesel boats can do nowadays.

The frightening thing is, if they can’t get to the surface, they’ve lost their pressurized air somehow to purge ballast. That suggests an explosion or something that could have penetrated those tanks. At first I was thinking a fire that fried electrical, but in that scenario, they could still mechanically blow ballast and surface. But if that’s not the case, something really bad happened.

Keln, D-Es ( like our old fleet boats ) are vulnerable to hydrogen gas buildup during charging cycles ( even your LA-class boat had big batteries ) so I’m increasingly suspecting a hydrogen gas explosion and sea water into the battery which means chlorine gas in the boat and no electrical power ! May also mean surviving crew is isolated from the main control panels for buoyancy .

Sometimes you can’t count on the electronic gizmos. I have read that our Navy is teaching once again celestial navigation and old-fashioned dead reckoning using an old-timey sextant. I think it’s cool to have these skills. Like knowing how to use a compass instead of using a GPS.

Even when I was on, we did not 100% fully depend on electronic gizmos, as you put it. Not even with reactor safety. At the most basic level we depended on things like gravity that never fail. Or just pure mechanical manipulation (moving something by hand).

This is pretty much the nightmare scenario for any submariner. We always knew that if something goes wrong it’s pretty much going wrong for everyone on the boat. There have thankfully been very few since WWII that have had to enter the rolls of the Eternal Patrol, and I hope it is not the case with these guys.

The best we can hope for is they are bobbing topside dead in the water and a loss of power and comms while just waiting for someone to find them.

May God be with them and they be found alive. In either case, the Navy Hymn is always relevant.

speaking of bobbing on the sea, someone from the Coast Guard told me the very best (low-tech) way to signal those searching for you is with an old cd – you look at the searchers’ plane through the hole, and that orients it the best way to flash at them. so carry cd’s to the ocean with you, all.

Latest info I have is the sub has been located in 70 meters of water off the coast of Patagonia . The USN is ( or so I heard ) sending its DSRV to the scene . The local sea state is reported as waves of 9 meters which is likely to hamper surface operations. I believe the ARA San Juan is German built D-E ( diesel-electric ) boat that’s recently seen a refit. But the sea is a hostile environment for submariners and they’re down in one of the worst ! Prayers for the crew ! They could survive for some time, ( or perhaps not ) , it all depends upon the nature of their casualty.

This sub was cut in half to refit batteries and perhaps propulsion. That being said if this sub was in the Argentine Sea off the Argentina coast with an average depth of 3,952 feet, they might have arrived at there crush depth. World War II German U-boats had a collapse depth in the range of 660 to 920 feet.
If the crew is sitting at the bottom it may be too late to save them.

Still On Patrol :
During World War II[edit]
During World War II, the U.S. Navy’s submarine service suffered the highest casualty percentage of all the American armed forces, losing one in five submariners.[3] Some 16,000 submariners served during the war, of whom 375 officers and 3131 enlisted men were killed.[4]

Fifty-two submarines of the United States Navy were lost during World War II.[5] Two — Dorado (SS-248) and Seawolf (SS-197)—were lost to friendly fire (with S-26 (SS-131) probably additional friendly fire, as the collision with USS Sturdy (PC-460) appears due to being mistaken for a U-boat), at least two more –Tulibee and Tang—to defective torpedoes, and six to accident or grounding.[6]

Another eight submarines went missing while on patrol and are presumed to have been sunk by Japanese mines, as there were no recorded Japanese anti-submarine attacks in their patrol areas. The other thirty-three lost submarines are known to have been sunk by the Japanese.

Keln, There are at least two flag officers i want dig up and burn their remains for the catastrophic consequences of the “Torpedo Club” s putting a weapon with a 50% performance trial success rate into service ! Then there’s the “magnetic exploder” debacle and the Navy’s permitting its designer to keep his flag and require “his boats” to use them . Not only did it destroy the reputations and careers of some good sub skippers it led to a “sub rosa ” mutiny where sailing boats disabled the feature and re-enabled it on any torps they brought back . Worse was the abysmal QA/QC of torpedo steering and depth-keeping engines out of Groton, CT shops. The “contact exploder” debacle was a completely separate ( and perhaps worse ) issue requiring “field testing and fixes” in wartime conditions. We don’t really know how many US Submariners lost their lives to poor torpedo performance but my readings over fifty years indicates it was too many !

When you have an institutional culture that cover’s up the mistakes of senior leaders. You are going to be continually surprised by the enemy and events because the only thing learned from those mistakes is how best to cover them up.

The San Jorge Gulf (Golfo San Jorge) is a bay in southern Patagonia, Argentina. It is an ocean basin opening to the Atlantic. Its shoreline spans Chubut and Santa Cruz province. The gulf measures approximately 142 miles (229 km) at its mouth and covers approximately 39 square kilometres (15 sq mi). It is located between Cape Dos Bahías and Cape Tres Puntas.

Due to its geography, more than 70% of the gulf’s basin is between 70 metres (230 ft) and 100 metres (328 ft) deep. To the south it is about 50 metres (164 ft) 60 metres (197 ft) deep and in the north 90 metres (295 ft). The seabed was formed by bivalves and cirripedial remains, and it consists of mud, sand, gravel, and sand with carbonate.

The mean water temperature varies between 5.09 °C (41 °F) and 13.41 °C (56 °F); salinity is around 33000 ppm.

http://www.passageweather.com/ for surface wind and wave charts. Just click the map to isolae the Atlantic off their coast. Argentina is UTC -3 so it’s just past 4 a.m there and the sunrise is about 0540.

Since it hasn’t been brought up yet; can anyone explain why Argentina needs to have submarines on patrol? Would venture a guess that there’s a 50-50 chance that ship had Chinese crew members onboard. What exactly was their mission? Hopefully they will be found alive and well, then we may get some answers.

Thanks. That is a good enough explanation as any. Guess if they have bought those 3 subs (2 built in the ’80s and one from the ’70s) they may as well use them for something. The “mighty” Brazilian Navy north of them has 5 so maybe there is some political neighborhood posturing going on? We wish them luck!

So I have a strange fascination with submarines and I’ve read a lot about them. This particular sub was laid down in 1982 and went through an update from 2008 to 2013. There are so many things that can go wrong with submarines, any thing from a torpedo explosion to hull implosion. From news accounts it was a base to base trip along the coast of Argentina and they probably didn’t hit crush depth conditions in the ocean. If they are lost, I hope their end was painless. But with newly updated features, maybe the submarine is resting at bottom awaiting rescue. We just don’t know yet.

The report lists the basic minimum depth rating of the Gulf of San Jorge, 70 meters. Don’t rely on it. From the general map location they are right on the edge of the shelf, I estimate it at 300 to 800 feet of depth near the edge, then drops off into the thousands.

If they are down there, I know who the U.S. Navy would’ve called.. but this particular company is not in the deep sea business anymore and the legends have all retired by now..

A few of my senior ranks were there. Unsung heroes they were.. many times over. This one’s become somewhat unclassified.. rest assured there are others that are still under wraps.. Global Marine headed up this one because of its link to Howard Hughes and his deep pocket investment in the customization of the vessel Glomar Explorer for the mission. As far as the crew the best of the best were contracted from all the major American underwater contractors in the market.. same with the investigation of the Glomar Java Sea.. some of them were my supervisors as well..

I remember the pretext / cover story (deep sea manganese nodule mining), the hype about the Hughes Glomar Explorer as it was being built, and years later being so amazed at how we pulled this off. The disinformation worked like a charm.

Who’s to say we can’t do something like this again? Who’s to say something like this is not already underway? Connect the dots, folks.

In the Gulf of Mexico it is easy to make cover.. The German sub U-166 was found by BP/Shell in about 5200 fsw recently.. It was touted that it was “the only German U-boat sunk in the Gulf of Mexico..”. Ha!.. Hey look over there.. narwhals..

Lauren; Losing depth control in deep water is a relatively quick death. When hull integrity fails ( usually aft around the screw(s) ) the resultant “water ram” overpressure ignites everything flammable ( including sailors ) just like in a diesel ignition sequence resulting in an explosion hence the oft-noted “underwater flash” when surface ships sank a U-boat in WW2 . At an alleged 70 meters depth this isn’t going to be the fate of the San Juan’s crew .

I worked with a man from Germany. He was a German submarine sailor during WW2. He said it wasn’t a choice. He also told me the Germans subs were not set up to make sailors comfortable. It was very cold and miserable. I would imagine this one is too.

This is all very scary to hear , and sad , especially around the Holidays .
Praying for a Lives Saved outcome for the submarine crew .
To All Contributors of this thread , Thank You .
I’ve read a lot about WWll , though I know little
about submarines . I appreciate All the Knowledge you are
sharing here tonight ,,, and sounding like a lot of
First Hand Smarts 💌! Godspeed the Submariners . 💖

Just wanted to add….
In the book Blind Man’s Bluff which is about submarine espionage, the CIA created a crane ship for the purpose of raising a sunken Soviet submarine. Seriously. If that ship is still around, maybe the US government could help with raising the Argentinian submarine. The Soviet submarine Kursk was raised in 2001 with the assistance of a company called Mammoet (I think.) And yeah, I have a strange fascination with submarines.

And when the U.S. Navy finishes that search, maybe they can spend a little time trying to figure out how to navigate in a way that doesn’t allow other ships to ram them. I think we have had at least 3 or 4 of these incidents, which include deaths. Are the navigators being dumbed down in order to allow “more” applicants, or is the entire Navy being dumbed down to be sure that diversity rules! I’m afraid that is the case, and if it is then some changes had better take place post haste!

By DANIEL POLITI and ERNESTO LONDOÑO NYT
November 19, 2017
MAR DEL PLATA, Argentina — After an initial burst of optimism that they might be closer to finding a submarine that has been missing since Wednesday, the Argentine authorities on Sunday began expressing caution as fears grew about the fate of the 44 crew members.

This is the first time that an official has mentioned the sub encountering mechanical problems.

However, the brother of a crew member had earlier told local media that in a message before communications were lost his sibling had mentioned that the vessel was having problems with its batteries.

US satellite company Iridium had earlier said that the submarine carried one of its satellite phones on board.

But the company said that the seven signals did not come through its network and, on Monday, navy spokesman Enrique Balbi confirmed the attempted calls “did not come from the submarine’s satellite phone”.